Desert Songs(2)
Lulled by light, long and low.
Warm winds, fled with birdsong.
Distant rises the muezzins’ heart,
A hive of bees, nectar-fed.
The sands lift to colour the air,
A wave of snakes, a river in time.
—
Posts Tagged ‘landscape’
Desert Songs 2 (Bahrain, November, 2014)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Bahrain, desert, Gulf, landscape, photography, Poetry on November 29, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Blink
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Bahrain, desert, landscape, photography, Poetry on November 29, 2014| Leave a Comment »
BLINK
Days of endless sun.
Thought and purpose
Slowly lift, shimmer, evaporate.
Staring at white horizons.
Blink.
Dog pack saunters
From shade to shade
Sniffing flowerbeds.
Blink.
Sand took form,
An antlike persistence
In the angled walls,
Windowless, shadowed.
Blink.
Ink-slow waves
In a gelatinous evening.
The winding path,
A hum of far generators.
Blink.
A camel yawns,
A cat scratches.
Blink.
Palm trees
Practice the mudras
Of elegance,
Lifting and falling
In a rippled breeze.
Blink.
The turquoise sea –
A clear calm eye.
This trembling smile
Of shoreline.
Blink.
The low land, reluctant,
Drinks sweat and blood,
Who would be content
With only water and love
And a settling of peace
To bloom with wild and lonely greens
( a song of shade and a same old longing-
Moon and moonlight).
Blink.
The small birds flit
The fast small hawk.
A flash of feather alley-fast
And soaring minaret,
A calligraphy of vowels,
A calligraphy of gesture.
A moment threaded through the blue
And sunlit sand.
Blink.
A sudden upright green,
A wash of convinced colour –
Reward for winter rains.
Blink.
Blink.
Desert Voices (1)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Bahrain, desert, landscape, photography, Poetry, sun on November 29, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Desert Voices.
Violet sky.
A woman
Is the air,
Dancing.
Wind,
The audience.
A silent world.
—
A silent world.
Waiting
For the footprints
Of saints.
Dust and sand
Dancing in lines.
In the heat,
Shadows melt away
To nothing.
—
Shadows melt away
To nothing.
Birds hop
From tree to tree.
Cat sits still,
Rolls and stretches.
—
All Roads
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged consciousness, gnomic verse, landscape, late autumn, memory, Poetry, Powys, roads, Wales, weather on November 3, 2014| 4 Comments »
From our door
The river we see
Is named ‘river’.
The mountain on the horizon
Is ‘mountain’.
But the woods,
The woods,
Are named from whispers,
And the farms
From grief and joy.
Belonging
Is not a gift
Nor a right.
It lives in an open heart
Free from reasons
And excuses.
The old stag oak
Now wears a crown of gold,
The ash and alder wear
Empty sky.
All roads arrow straight,
But for their bends.
All hills are green
From a certain distance.
The rivers run full
After a night’s rain
And the sun is stretched
And etched with rainbows.
There is not a promise
That it cannot be forgotten.
There is not a day
That cannot be glorious.
—
Long Nights
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged darkness, landscape, night, Poetry, samhain, senses, time and space on October 30, 2014| Leave a Comment »
LONG NIGHTS
It is the very egg of long nights:
Still and black, a light rain falling.
The cats peer silent from windows,
The long fire slowly fades and whispers.
In the garden there will be slugs,
Stately, weaving their own fine galactic trails.
Beyond, in the meadows, glimmering sheep
Will nonchalantly chew, nod and say grace,
Nod and say grace.
There will be owls and a scurry of mice.
And there will be dreams sliding
Between the in and the out of breath,
A tower of worlds, made and unmade,
A cascade of tomorrows in dark and light.
For most, (but never for all),
There will be a slow dawn.
A new wind from the hills,
A resumption: nets and hooks set
Eager to catch time, labelled, minuted,
Used, misused, wasted.
But not now,
Not now.
Not in this one vessel of darkness:
One long curve holding curved void.
Not distinguished are the living or the dead.
All are quiet ghosts
Tasting the certain past
And this turning, rolling, cooling night air.
—
Valley Road
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged hills, Home, landscape, Mynydd Eppynt, photography, Poetry, valleys, Wales on October 29, 2014| 4 Comments »
VALLEY ROAD
Hard against the hill
Is the shining snake road,
A year of seasons in its moods.
By the river’s wide roll it begins.
From sheep and fields and farms it rises.
Past the flat-capped shepherds, tight
Behind their wheels,
Through mud and puddles up, and corners
Rising to the sky, the open forbidden hills.
(A view of storm mountains, pearled
Valleys ploughed with mist and rainbows).
Down and round again, shuttled roads.
The forest’s lip, dark and curved,
With roaring streams and dappled.
Oak valleys pooled below, copper gold,
Horned, delighted.
A cast of rain thrown down
And forgotten.
The wilds of cloud and tussock,
Then down, down to the surf green,
To the familial names, to the crossed roads,
The straight paths.
To the door, our home in the dear silence.
The tall ashes pale now and yellowed
Falling one by one, as if counting,
As if counting.
___
Those Distant Hillsides
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Autumn, cloud, Freedom, glory, hillsides, joy, landscape, landscape photography, melancholy, nostalgia, Poetry, purpose, rain, ravens, reality, saints, the past, Wales, washpool on October 25, 2014| 4 Comments »
Those distant hillsides,
They are not velvet, not green,
But bog and rock, sweat steep
For all but ravens
(Whose feathers we might wish for,
For straight as an arrow, for
Wind carried swift joy,
For the soar of it, for the wide,
Open cry of it, for exultance,
For freedom from sins).
But down here, wind-sheltered,
Small, feasting on cold hopes,
Yearning for mist smoked valleys.
Did they watch from alder carrs
The washer girls, raw red hands
And tearful eyes, arching backs
And mournful, moaning songs?
Did they feel the Lord swell within them,
Those saints forbidden their fruits,
Wilderness dazed, sharp chinned,
Spear-eyed witnesses?
So many brave boys borne away,
Cudgeled and shivered in blood.
So many unborn, covered in autumn leaves,
And wept over.
So many promises split, broken open
(Nothing but spit and spite remaining).
So many reasons to slide into silence
Hoping for a glorious trumpet
And ’til then, peace.
Of the earth.
They are all of the earth
And know it not,
Or birch their blessings
For want of wit and a little love.
The pines roar
But bear no anger.
The pines cry
But have no sadness.
The rain sweeps down across the valley.
Leaves fall, air becomes sweetly bitter.
There is no blame, should you stay,
Should you watch.
Everything will seem as it is:
Sun through mist, a mellow round passing.
We shall melt as we are gathered together.
Melt and become another again.
One or two words (only) to pass through
The narrow straits of a few years,
Before they too will become singing silence.
This melancholy is a cloak for deeper joy.
This deeper joy, a cloak for melancholy.
All notes sung before the throne,
Chords of major and minor,
Diminished, augmented.
—
Invitation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Autumn, healing, landscape, light, photography, Poetry, solace, Wales, woodland on October 23, 2014| 3 Comments »
INVITATION
Come, come whilst the woods are green and golden.
Days crumble and fall, a burnished bracken,
A tremble of cobwebs.
They tumble and cascade, ripened and rotten,
A glorious ferment, a willed and wanted collapse.
The roof-tops in the forest,
Moss covered, dripping:
A kind of amicable silence,
A shared solitude
Threaded with birdsong.
Our scars, our pains, show
How we have become ourselves.
They are the maps that have brought us here.
In these pools of silence
Put them aside, fall, forget.
Come into cloud silences, the tumbling breezes.
In early morning, a slow drifting time,
The calligraphy of bats above the feeding sheep.
Where distance comes and goes,
The river’s voice everywhere and nowhere.
The long, pink dawn stretching low,
Rolled out on bird wings,
The green gold of valley oaks.
Come, before the days grow too short,
Before the fords deepen and run so fast.
The still soft light of woodland,
Bramble, bracken, willowherb that browns and thins.
And the dead risen up in their Sunday hats:
They sit in circles and talk endlessly
Of the past that we are become.
Come if you are homesick for woodsmoke,
For a slow, unwinding road,
A symphony of edges,
A breathed rhythm,
An enfoldment, a rapture,
An end and a beginning of stories.
A little time away.
A time given back to the world.
To be unnoticed, camoflaged, melted,
Drowned sweetly, the waves of autumn.
—
Cefn Gorwydd
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Autumn, Cambrian Mountains, Cefn Gorwydd, landscape, landscape photography, Poetry, Powys, the Eppynt, Wales on October 20, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Cefn Gorwydd ( pronounced something like ‘kev’n guroo eth’ ) is the hamlet where we now live. It is strung along a high ridge between two ranges of upland : old mountains- some of the oldest in the world- the Cambrians and the Eppynt, once home to druid saints and radical preachers…
CEFN GORWYDD
Here we all are, eight in a row
Sight pinned to one view.
Welcomed by distance
Absorbed, belonged, threaded in.
Suspended in swift airs,
Slowly turned, become diaphanous in thought.
Vague only to the roaring loggers
Mumbling down to valley woods,
Vague to the laboured city breath.
Worn thin and cherished
On the sight of light and land,
On the crisp edge and whispered mists.
Folded in and waiting.
The mountains’ round names
Seeping into stilled minds,
Burned purple, stained grey, rubbed in gold.
The layered edge a lilting song
A yearn for valleys curling north.
We are named, but little, a scattered thing
Tumbled together by this or that.
Laid out in a neat line
Patted down, a pattern of years.
We become monastic, an inward road.
Going and returning slow step by step
Between a fuller season
And a perfect prayer.
—
RIVER FULL
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Autumn, drawing, landscape, nature, Poetry, storm, Wales, weather on October 9, 2014| 4 Comments »
1
River full and woodsmoke
Days now, dark and fast as water
Flickering as night thunder
The houses and we shall huddle
Against the black slant of rain
Against the towering, swooping clouds.
Settling in the drift of slow, golden leaves
The bitter bite of brightest bramble
Aspen leaves, their last long laughter.
In the silver firs, on the church tower,
Jackdaws chafe and circle chatter
Wind skirls dancing, wet skirts slapping.
—
2
These mountains, worn low
Settled down, but content,
(As humans could never be),
Folded arms, their valley breasts.
A sharp-eyed, smiling mam,
Neat pinny fields, indulged with sheep.
—
3
I ride again the poetry road along a ridge of weather.
Words hovering, red and lithe as kite tail feathers
Tasting wet, west winds.
Hope and ambition, a stiff field thistle
Lasting out the slow rot to winter.
Wood will bend, sedge stand stiff,
A hard chew, a gristle is this cold tune.
Worn thin, the leaves rattle, a clatter of bones.
Death’s feet dancing to keep himself
Warm for hedgerow work.
Ghost cries of fox down in the valley wood
Disturbing warm-sided farm dogs, a howling choir.
Night and day, a scatter of starlight,
A tumble of rain.
—
simonhlilly 